- 2025-11-10 *
I played a few dozen hours when Vampire Survivors was launched. It was ok, kinda addicting, but I thought it was not enough to keep me playing.
Man, I was wrong.
The “secret” to this game is that it has a lot of unlockables. And I do mean a lot. Stuff just appears out of nowhere after you do something random during a run, and if you are chasing the unlocks on purpose, you’ll need the wiki open to check the requirements for each one. This thing is like old arcade games, where the replay value was on finding out hidden stuff — and then, trying to break the game itself, heh.
What really kept me playing this time, though, was finding out there were some collabs since release, like with Contra, SaGa, and Castlevania (only this last one makes some kind of sense, haha…
- 2025-11-10 *
I played a few dozen hours when Vampire Survivors was launched. It was ok, kinda addicting, but I thought it was not enough to keep me playing.
Man, I was wrong.
The “secret” to this game is that it has a lot of unlockables. And I do mean a lot. Stuff just appears out of nowhere after you do something random during a run, and if you are chasing the unlocks on purpose, you’ll need the wiki open to check the requirements for each one. This thing is like old arcade games, where the replay value was on finding out hidden stuff — and then, trying to break the game itself, heh.
What really kept me playing this time, though, was finding out there were some collabs since release, like with Contra, SaGa, and Castlevania (only this last one makes some kind of sense, haha). I’m still playing the Castlevania content, which seems to be the larger one, but it’s the perfect example of what I said about unlockables: you start and can see there are around 20 characters to unlock. Great. You unlock them slowly, then play the game with a specific character going to a specific part of the map, suddenly there’s a funny cutscene and now you have 20 more characters to unlock. And so you go to unlock them, but sometimes new ones will just appear on the list out of nowhere too.
It’s pure madness.
And the map is pretty great too. I remember the original game maps being just these open areas where you run circles around enemies trying to get XP to level up and get better weapons. Now, there are “proper” maps, with progression unlocking new parts and new bosses — that you can freely summon — each new run. I like it.
So, that’s it. My life has been consumed by Vampire Survivors this last week. I learned how to build overpowered weapon combos, how to break bounds with high-speed characters, how to cheese death, and so on, and I still want to play more. It’s so satisfying to just mow down enemies in the late-game while chasing new secrets and unlocks, and if you enjoy lots of colorful stuff happening on the screen, this game is a joy. However, you also have to accept the janky it has: when I first started playing, I tried to be strategic about positioning and whatnot, until the enemy spawning got out of control later in the stage and the enemies just... came from everywhere, didn’t matter if there was a wall or if it was out of bounds for the map. Balancing is also nonexistent, which is another thing that reminds me of more arcade-y games. So, to enjoy it, you have to embrace it all1.
Anyway, here are some screenshots from late-game stages with random characters from the Castlevania DLC. There is no alt text in these images because they are just an incomprehensible explosion of colors and pixels making almost no sense. Even when playing, I sometimes don’t understand what’s going on.
What really bothers me is that some sounds are too loud, others are too quiet, including the music.↩